THE ever popular imagery of Malaysian artists – featuring the buffalo, a plough and a tardy paddy farmer in a kampong scene may soon be iconised in art forever in the near future.
Malaysia’s stereotype rural landscape is on the cusp of embracing digital agriculture – a matrix that will change the face of the country’s pastoral landscape to that of a modern and millennial panorama.
This will happen soon if local firm, Kambyan Network, has its way. The entrepreneur is raring to introduce the Industrial 4.0 technology to rural heartland farmers as well as to big players involved in major cash crop plantations.
For now, Kambyan Network is going big on drone technology to provide solutions in the critical areas of large scale food cropping.
The company’s research assistant, Kiirthan Jeevan Jothee, told The Petri Dish , to address critical challenges in the farming sector, the company has developed a sentient platform called ManUsIA – an acronym for Man Using Intelligent Applications. [ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]
“This is to provide autonomous support to agricultural enterprises. ManUsIA will serve as a total solution platform to enhance the management of every application used in digital agriculture.
“We will begin to use this platform in oil palm plantations for now,” he said, adding, right now our company is emerging into the digital agriculture field where we provide end-to-end service and solutions.”
According to him, the company provides a system known as the AutoHaFeWeT. It stands for autonomous harvesting, fertilisation, weeding and transportation for the agricultural sector beginning with oil palm plantations. This system is monitored by the ManUsIA platform via cloud storage for data collection and processing.
“Here, aerial mapping drones provide snapshots of the whole plantation area while ground sensor drones collect all necessary sensory data such as nutrient content, soil condition and water levels.
“The data output from these drones will be presented to plantation owners to indicate the areas of their plantation that require more care.
“For instance, if a certain area requires more fertiliser, the plantation owner can command the drone using the mobile application platform, ManUsIA to spray fertiliser at a particular area. This way, a lot of money will be saved,” said Kiirthan.
He said Kambyan Network has a roadmap of automated drones developed – each with a specific purpose. These drones communicate among each other via cloud computing.
According to him, Kambyan Network is currently working on their harvesting drone which essentially uses high powered laser to penetrate through the thick fruits and leave stalks during the harvesting process.
He said within the next three years, Kambyan Network aims to be the digital agriculture solution provider for all plantations in the Southeast Asia region.
“One of the major concern for palm oil plantation is its maintenance and labour cost, especially in Malaysia where the owners depend heavily on foreign workers. With this technology, everything is made transparent as the whole agricultural system is digitalised and can be monitored at fingertips,” said.
He also said besides operations and R&D, Kambyan Network also has two educational institutions – The UAS and Robotics Academy where professional drone operator training is provided for professionals and our company staffs. All our staff members are professionally trained on drone operations, Kiirthan added.
Another educational body is the Adroit College which provides workshops and HRDF-approved professional certificate in robotics process automation for free. Most of the courses conducted are all IR4.0based such as drone engineering and big data.
Kambyan Network research team. [/ihc-hide-content]
